On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan stood before an audience of evangelicals and declared that the Soviet government was the “focus of evil in the modern world.” The arena erupted in unsurprising applause, standing ovations, and echoes of the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers.” While many conservatives supported a hardline stance on the Soviet Union, the religious right gave Reagan the moral backing he needed to reignite the Cold War.

Pastors preached sermons about the godless, evil Russians. The 3.5 million-strong National Association of Evangelicals—who invited Reagan to address its annual gathering, where he gave that 1983 speech—became “a leading anti-communist voice.” And the Moral Majority purchased full-page advertisements in newspapers using charged religious language to frame the issues. “Recognizing the inherently moral nature of debates about nuclear weapons, the Moral Majority gave Reagan’s policies the weight of their moral authority,” as historian Jeremy Hatfield has observed.

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More than three decades later, another Republican prepares to move into the White House, but unlike Reagan, President-elect Donald Trump seems to be cozying up to the former Soviet Union. If this weren’t enough to contradict Reagan’s legacy, some of his most loyal Cold War allies—conservative Christians—have advocated building bridges with Russia. As the new administration makes its plans, their collective moral voice may be just what Trump needs to thaw relations with the big bear across the sea.

Given how the Republican Party has lionized Reagan, it’s difficult to imagine the party’s top leader embracing the country his predecessor once stood against. And yet, Trump has gone out of his way to laud Russian President Vladimir Putin on numerous occasions, even giving his leadership an “A” rating. Last month, Trump praised Putin as “very smart” for delaying his response to new American sanctions against Russia. And Putin has returned the favor, calling Trump a “clever man” and “talented.”

If that weren’t enough to make the Gipper roll over in his grave, Trump has even seemingly sided with Russia over his own government. After U.S. intelligence officials announced that Russia hacked into Democratic officials’ emails to influence the November election, the president-elect challenged their assessment. When American officials said that pro-Russian forces in Ukraine shot down a Malaysia Airlines flight in 2015, Trump claimed, “no one really knows who did it.” When he was asked about Putin killing dissenters, Trump replied, “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also.” And, of course, Trump has famously claimed that Putin is a stronger leader than President Barack Obama.

Conservative Christians, including well-known evangelical leaders, have similarly defended Russia and decried the outgoing American president. Franklin Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, praised Putin in a 2014 op-ed for enacting harsh anti-LGBT laws:

Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda—Russia’s standard is higher than our own?

In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

Graham also reportedly attacked Obama while visiting Russia—claiming, according to Russian press, that Obama “promotes atheism.” Nary a peep was heard from conservative Christians in response to Graham criticizing an American president before a foreign audience. Which is to say, they did not give Graham the treatment many gave the Dixie Chicks when the singers criticized George W. Bush while abroad.

The protection against the LGBT “agenda” that Graham referenced is a 2013 “gay propaganda” law that makes it illegal in Russia to regard straight and same-sex relationships as equal or disseminate materials promoting gay rights. The law is part of a Russian state-led crackdown on LGBT rights that has led to an increase in violence against gays and lesbians—including beatings, abductions, and public humiliation.

The year the law was passed, the World Congress of Families announced it would host its annual conference in Russia. (Though after much controversy, they canceled the gathering.) Headquartered in Rockford, Illinois, the WCF has been one of the most powerful religious-right groups fighting the legalizations of gay marriage and abortion abroad since its founding in 1997. The WCF has helped organize several events in Russia since 2010, and WCF’s executive director said he hoped American evangelicals would be “true allies” in Russia’s fight to protect Christian values.

State-sponsored discrimination of gays and lesbians doesn’t sound like a Christian value. But some prominent evangelicals seem to regard it as such, including Bryan Fischer, spokesman for the evangelical American Family Association, who said the propaganda law was the type of “public policy that we’ve been advocating”—and might not have gone far enough. And Peter LaBarbera of Americans for the Truth About Homosexuality, who backed the legislation. And the American Center for Law and Justice, a prominent evangelical legal group that has supported some of Putin’s anti-LGBT measures. And Brian Brown, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, who actually traveled to Russia to testify on behalf of anti-gay legislation and called Putin a “lion of Christianity.”

In recent days, other evangelical leaders have also joined the pro-Russia chorus. Televangelist Jim Bakker, for example, expressed excitement that Putin might help Trump usher in the end times and hasten the second coming of Jesus. Ted Baehr, founder of MovieGuide and America’s most prominent evangelical film critic, has publicly supported Russia, too: He traveled there recently on a speaking tour, vowed to use his organization to protect Russian families from so-called non-traditional values, and has even encouraged the creation of a “Christian Oscar” in the country.

Russia is just as totalitarian as it ever was, but this doesn’t seem to matter to some evangelicals.

From religious liberty to LGBT rights, Russia is just as totalitarian as it ever was, but this doesn’t seem to matter to some evangelicals. Which means that the religious right—a force that helped Reagan defeat Mikhail Gorbachev’s oppressive regime—might help Trump forge strong bonds with Putin’s oppressive regime. Oh, irony of ironies.

Not all evangelical leaders are smitten with Russia. But even some who aren’t keen on Putin still support Trump’s efforts to strengthen ties. Robert Jeffress, a Trump supporter and megachurch pastor in Dallas, Texas, told me he is not sympathetic toward Moscow’s stances on religious freedom or LGBT issues. Still, he supports the president-elect firming up the United States’ relationship with the country.

“I do not fault President-elect Trump for trying to find common ground with Russia—or any nation, especially when it comes to eradicating ISIS,” Jeffress said via email. “In a nuclear world, trying to build bridges with your enemies is a virtue, not a vice—as long as those bridges do not provide a pathway for your enemies to destroy you.”

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the United States, is concerned with Russia’s restrictions on religious liberty; calls their treatment of sexual minorities “barbaric”; and says he doesn’t trust Putin’s intentions. But Falwell still supports the Trump administration potentially getting closer to Putin’s government.

“I look at Trump more as a very, very, very shrewd and calculating businessman, and I think any good businessman would try to open up opportunities for negotiation and for relationship-building,” Falwell told me. “I think that’s all he’s tried to do with Putin. I think he’s smart enough to know that you can’t even negotiate if you don’t have a relationship.”

Falwell’s late father was the founder of the Moral Majority. He was tasked by Reagan himself to convince evangelicals to support a hardline approach to the Soviet Union, and he literally wrote the book on why Christians should be wary of Russia. But when asked what his father’s position would be if he were still alive, the younger Falwell said his dad would support Trump forging a relationship with Putin for the purpose of negotiating world affairs.

Religion has influenced politics since the nation’s founding. As George Washington said in his 1796 farewell address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Alexis de Tocqueville noted religion will play an important role in American politics so long as the United States remains a country comprised of religious citizens. And as historians Andrew Preston, Bruce Schulman, and Julian Zelizer write in Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America:

Religious Americans contribute to national debates on ethics, morals, economics, the size and proper role of government, and foreign affairs. Either individually or collectively, they bring their influence to bear on the political process by making their views known to politicians and government officials—many of whom are themselves religious, or at least conversant with the history, values, and prerogatives of religious communities.

A president might support a law or foreign-policy strategy because it is politically expedient. But religious leaders can stamp “thus saith the Lord” on it and rally their large constituencies to the cause, as they did toward the end of the Cold War. The religious right just helped elect Donald Trump in the most stunning upset in modern American politics. Now they may help their president build a closer relationship with Russia than the United States has seen in a half-century.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”